A great number of products are manufactured in multiple countries or localities around the world. Many times, a device is manufactured in one locality and then shipped for use in another locality. The localization configuration process tailors a device to the particular language, currency, protocol and other requirements peculiar to a specific geographic area or locale. Redeploying a device targeted for one locale to another locale due to suddenly changing market conditions may be extremely complex or impossible when the localization process is designed for only single locale.
More sophisticated localization routines can be used to target multiple locales. Localization for multiple locales embeds the localization information for all the various target locales in the device. To complete the localization process on a configurable device like this, there are two general conventional solutions. In one case, the configurable device is manufactured without any particular localization information. Instead, the localization process is applied just before the manufactured product is deployed or sold into a specific locale. This approach can be time consuming and expensive for the manufacturer as it often requires physically opening the package or containers for each product and then resealing.
Another approach makes the customer of the product responsible for performing the final localization operation. In this case, the customer changes the settings in the device to the proper locale when the product is first used. This approach works wells as long as the customer is able to use the default locale set at manufacture to make the proper changes.
Unfortunately, the default locale set during manufacture does not always provide users with adequate control to modify the locale. In some cases, the language of the default locale used to operate a menu in a device cannot be understood by the customer and changes to the locale cannot be accurately made. For example, the menu control system for a digital camera having a default locale of Japan may not be useful if redeployed to the United States unless the customer can read and understand Japanese.
Similarly, certain default localization routines may be technically too complex for users to modify. For example, there are many different standards for operating various components of a television, DVD player or videocassette recorder (VCR). The related protocols and frequencies are often complex and sometimes difficult to select properly. Depending on the locale, televisions may use either NTSC or PAL encoding and operate with different intermediate and front-end frequencies. DVD players are configured with region codes specific to a geographic region and such codes cannot readily be used with DVDs designed for use in other regions. It is not reasonable to ask the average user to modify these devices to operate using different frequencies and protocols peculiar to their specific default locale.
Indeed, there is a need to simplify the localization process for consumers as well as minimize or eliminate the requirement for manufactures to open and repackage devices if they are redeployed into different locales.
Like reference numbers and designations in the various drawings indicate like elements.